Others can speak more eloquently than I can about the significance of mozilla.org's birth. I'll put it in much simpler terms: I owe my professional career to that event and the years that followed.
I have always been a fan of the Mozilla code base - dating all the way back to my early high school years when Netscape was appearing on the scene. Shortly after I'd finished writing my book on JavaScript, I discovered Mozilla's user-interface had a huge JavaScript presence in it. After a few years tinkering around in the Mozilla codebase, a recruiting agency contacted me and asked if I wanted to do that for a living. To which my answer then - and now - is "absolutely, yes!"
A few years later, I'm working at Skyfire Labs, Inc., (which coincidentally appeared today in the Wall Street Journal), and I'm having the time of my life. I'm doing what I wanted to do, and I'm getting paid nicely to do it. What could possibly be better than that?
So when someone wants to throw a party to celebrate what Mozilla's done for the past ten years - not just at the beginning - I'm there. Mozilla technology made it possible for me to earn a decent living doing what I do best. This community made it possible.
So, to everyone who's written a line of code, filed a bug, written a testcase, figured out how to make it easier on others, or just written down what it does and how to use it... thanks.
Posted by WeirdAl at March 31, 2008 8:11 AM